Intel Developer Forum To Play Up Wireless

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Intel will kick off its semiannual geekfest on Sept. 15, encouraging developers to tie the digital home together through wireless communications.

Although Intel’s Developer Forum has been somewhat sparsely attended in the past few years, this fall’s IDF will feature a sold-out exhibition hall and over 4,000 attendees from more than fifty countries, spread out over three days, according to Intel spokesman David Dickstein. The IDF will then move overseas in October, to Taipei; Mumbai; Moscow; and Shenzhen, China.

While Intel also meets privately with its developers to present product roadmaps and pricing changes, the company uses its IDF as a pulpit to present its view of the industry’s direction and hint at its own product plans for the coming months. This fall’s IDF will update attendees on convergence, a mantra of Intel’s ever since the firm began investing heavily in developing communications components.

Key show highlights will also include a public glimpse at future generations of enterprise and mobile processors, including more details of Intel’s wireless roadmap, according to Pat Gelsinger, Intel chief technology officer. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel will also discuss its plans for next-generation technologies, such as the PCI Express interface and DDR-2 memory, both of which should appear in 2004.

On Tuesday, the opening day of the show, Intel President Paul Otellini will present an overview of the show. Otellini will provide a “sneak peek” at Intel’s enterprise processor roadmap and some of the show’s expected highlights, according to Gelsinger, including Intel’s security solution, LaGrande. Otellini will probably not highlight the company’s second-half economic outlook, however.

“I don’t believe he will offer any second-half forecasts,” Gelsinger said in a conference call Friday morning. “We don’t want it to be a product show but a technology show. We try to shy away from the economic forecasts and make it the ultimate geekfest for the industry.”

Later that afternoon, Intel’s plans for the digital home will be outlined by Louis Burns, vice president and general manger of the Desktop Product s Group at Intel. Burns will highlight some of the approximately 20 digital media adapters designed by Linksys and others. The message, according to Gelsinger, is that Intel provides the infrastructure underlying the digital home.

“I think of home and the digital home stuff as plumbing,” Gelsinger said. “When you do any home maintenance, the bottom of the barrel is plumbing. I’ll do anything to avoid plumbing.”

On Wednesday, however, two of Intel’s wireless executives will lay out Intel’s pipes, wrenches, and valves for the coming year. Anand Chandrasekher, vice president and co-general manager of Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group and Ron Smith, senior vice president and general manager of the Wireless Communications and Computing Group, will update Intel’s Centrino and PCA embedded controller roadmaps.

Later that day, the topic will shift to servers; Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group, and Sandra Morris, vice president and chief information officer, will also delve deeply into the guts of the hardware.

Fister will present a new Intel initiative, dubbed TIANO, a server-specific extension of the Extended Firmware Interface (EFI) concept Intel first described at February’s spring ID. Intel’s EFI defines a new layer between the hardware and the operating system, replacing the BIOS with a combination of data tables and runtime service calls visible to the operating system.

TIANO will extend EFI into the server space, replacing the “8- and 16-bit spaghetti code that’s been layered on over the last few years” with a new layer that’s been re-architected for features like secure boot, hot plug-and-play capabilities, and RAID, Gelsinger said.

While communications may underlie Intel’s vision of the connected home, Thursday’s speeches will explore its own wireless infrastructure. In the morning, Eric Mentzer, vice president of Intel’s Communications Products Group, is expected to discuss Intel’s interconnect strategies, such as a communications-specific PCI Express AS connection, as well as Intel’s work in network and communication processors, storage, 10-Gbit Ethernet, and optical interconnects. Mentzer should also shine some light onto Intel’s plans to shift manufacturing onto the 90-nm process node, Gelsinger said.

Mentzer’s speech will include a demonstration of the 802.16 WiMAX wireless broadband technology and how it will interact with 802.11 components. Wireless-industry executives have said privately that they expect Intel to drive forward and past 802.11 technology and embrace WiMAX wholeheartedly, not least because Intel has yet to field an 802.11b module with components sourced entirely in-house, let alone 802.11a, 802.11g or hybrid devices.

Finally, Gelsinger himself will take the stage to round out the conference, discussing features of the next-generation “intelligent LAN”. Although Gelsinger oversees the research across the entire company, he said he has focused on a “Radio Free Intel” project, concentrating on silicon radios that can be quickly tuned to handle a multitude of frequencies.

If such a radio can be commercialized, future LAN chips would be able to talk to both WAN and LAN networks simultaneously, seamlessly handing off a user’s wireless connection from one network to the other, Gelsinger said.

“These are the things we’d roll into our Centrino product line,” Gelisinger said, although the improvements would have to wait for several years to be perfected and integrated.

Three Serial ATA milestones will also be announced, Dickstein said: Port Selector 1.0, Digital 1.1 and Port Multiplier 1.1. In addition, Intel will also hand out its “innovation” awards for PC design, focusing on products that will be actually brought to market.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story misstated the date that IDF begins. According to an Intel spokesman, IDF begins on Tuesday, Sept. 16. However, Intel is holding IDF-related press briefings on Monday, Sept. 15.

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